THE VAPORIZER OF THE LORD
Why do I write poems and essays? It’s all Walt Whitman’s fault. We spent our respective boyhoods in the same town: Huntington Station, New York. By the time I got there, it was almost as if he was still alive; his name was on a plethora of important places and things in town. This list included Walt Whitman Road, the Walt Whitman Mall, and Walt Whitman High School. All of this was before I read a single word of his poetry or prose.
This changed in grade school when Ms. Shaw took our class to the Walt Whitman House for a field trip. At first glance, the house didn’t strike me as anything special. It was two stories, like many of the homes in our neighborhood. It also had hedges just below what I presumed was the living room window, some of which stuck out like thick, wild strands of green hair. I thought to myself, “So far, so what?”
“This is Walt Whitman’s childhood home,” Ms. Shaw said. “What do you notice about it?”
“Quite a bit,” my friend Dave said. “I see it has windows, doors, doorknobs, and everything, like my grandparents’ place. I only hope it doesn’t reek of Jean Naté, mothballs, and whiskey.”
Ms. Shaw sighed and rolled her eyes. “How observant, Dave,” she said. “What do you say we go inside the house?”
Dave smirked. “Right,” he said to me. “This is so much better than going to the Amityville Horror House. Now that would be educational.”
When we went inside, Dave and I saw a lanky man with a purple beret, a goatee, bloodshot eyes, and thick glasses with square silver frames reading from a notebook to a group of people, some of whom wore leather jackets. He cleared his throat and read in a deep, booming voice.
“As Walt wrote, the grass is the handkerchief of the Lord, which made me, to slice his quote like a deranged butcher, look up with raspy gaps of shock and disbelief at the stars.”
Dave raised his left eyebrow. “I have no idea what the hell Bobby Beret is talking about. But I know I won’t look at the grass the same way again.”
“Same here,” I said. “Who knew God could catch a cold?”
“Right? I’ll bet he has an amazing vaporizer.”
“Yeah. He’s probably not a Kleenex kind of guy.”
“Definitely not,” Dave said. “I’ll bet his vaporizer is larger than the Death Star. The vaporizer of the Lord!”
Later on, after dinner, I brought out the garbage cans to the precipice of my family’s driveway. The sky was filled with clouds. It was humid. The moon and the stars stayed in for the night.
I tied my shoes. An orange tabby cat swaggered into my family’s front lawn. I watched it closely. It sniffed a pair of bottlecaps—sticky coins in neighboring crabgrass patches.
Bio:
Joey Nicoletti’s most recent books are Extinction Wednesday: A Memoir (Bordighera Press, 2024), Breakaway (Broadstone Books, 2023), and Fan Mail (Broadstone Books, 2021). He is the Reviews Editor of VIA: Voices in Italian Americana and teaches writing at SUNY Buffalo State University.
OVUNQUE SIAMO 